Ok, I just got back from two weeks in LA, and I am headed out to Atlanta in a couple of weeks immediately followed by another LA trip. Whee. E3 here I come. Anyway, while I was hanging out in Hollywood with some friends, we started chatting about my “Designing the perfect MMO” commentary and the conversation sort of took off on a tangent and then went on a long vacation as we discussed death in MMORPGs….
So, let’s see. I think that there must be death, and there must be some penalty. There are several reasons for this: First, death is needed as a mechanic to facilitate the suspension of disbelief and the overall immersion of the player into the game. I am sure some of you are remembering some experience where you died and it screwed up your clan raid, or knocked your character so hard back into last week that you just logged out in irritation. “I hate dying!” you say. “It really pisses me off that one death takes me a whole week of hardcore grinding just to get back to where I was!” you shout at me. Or, even worse, you have painful memories of that time (happens to all of us) where you died, and then when you were trying to get your body/gear you died AGAIN, and then some idiot cleric tries to rezz you in the middle of “the pit of death leeches on the zomg plains”, which of course gets you killed again. By now you are thinking you are going to be stuck with rezz sickness for at least a full cycle of the moon, and you could get a college degree in the time it would take you to regain all the lost experience.
It is starting to sound like I am making a strong excuse for eliminating death entirely from MMORPGs, isn’t it? I can imagine all of the casual MMO players out there nodding your heads vigorously. Ain’t gonna happen folks. Well, no, I take that back. I have seen some really really stupid design decisions in MMORPGs, it wouldn’t surprise me to see one that has no death (or death penalty). Speaking of which, I challenge you to find a mere half dozen brilliant (ok, I’ll settle for clever) MMORPG designers.
Anyway, back to my topic. Death is a necessity. The lack of it completely diminishes the value of accomplishment and advancement. We all know that MMORPGs today are pretty much all about the whole “level and loot” (I should TM this) thing, so obviously removing death would be “a real bad thing”. Have you ever played a FPS or an RTS in god mode? Yeah, it is super fun for about half an hour while you unleash your wrath on your enemy, who is helpless before you. And then it gets real boring. The fun of completing a game based on your own skill and merit is a great feeling (not so much if you just cheatcoded your way through it).
So what’s my point? Death forces players to use their heads, think about situations they face, and develop their skills in strategy, tactics, and reflexes. If there was no death, then what would be the point? Ok, so for the sake of trimming this post down to 50 pages or less, humor me and let’s just all agree that death MUST be a mechanic in any MMORPG.
The questions arise: How should it be implemented? What happens when a character is diminished to zero (or less) health? How painful should the sting (penalty) of death be? What about the process of restoring the character to life? Should they lose their items? Should they be respawned elsewhere, if at all? (city, bind point, nearest graveyard, etc.) What happens to the character? Are effects temporary (rezz sickness) or permanent (exp loss) or both?
I have heard arguements from both camps already…one thinks that death (and its effects) should be minimal and merely a momentary irritation. The other thinks that the sting of death should be severe and dramatic. Things get a little more realistic for them with heavy death penalties and they go out of their way to think a lot harder about situations where death is a strong possibility. I should note that the casual and hardcore gamers of the people I talked to were unexpectedly mixed for both opinions. I expected the casual gamers to be more in favor of the minimal penalties and the hardcore guys to prefer the stronger immersion experience of hefty death penalties.
Ok, this is where I want to get your opinions and feedback. What do you think? What was your worst experience with a character death? Have you ever had a good experience? Has a character death ever been an event worthy of role-playing a bit, or (as I might surmise) is the RPG in MMORPG a lost treasure that hasn’t been seen in many ages?
While you contemplate my questions and think about your response, I will give you my opinion. Lucky you!
First, I should say that the very thought of losing experience (including both a tangible loss: “you lose 50,000 exp” and the softer exp debt approach as in City of Heros) is a really bad idea. I like to design things to be within the context of a game’s world/mythos and borrow from the real world (real stuff helps with the whole immersion thing).
Experience was originally intended to be a mechanic that measured your character’s advancement through experiencing things…solving puzzles, persuading NPCs to do your bidding, being victorious in combat, saving the damsel in distress, and so forth. Why should you lose your experience (can be equated to memories?) from a death? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have your physical attibutes penalized instead? After all, wasn’t it your -body- that was recently mangled by the Ogre on the Goon Squad? I seem to remember a pencil and paper RPG that penalized your constitution or strength (don’t remember) for every death (or really bad ones where a skilled cleric didn’t get to you in time). That makes a lot more sense to me, but who the heck wants to lose a whole STAT point for a mere death? Not me.
Ok, so losing experience points is kind of lame, and no one wants to lose any stat points. What if we eliminate both as options, and simply stick the user with some rezz sickness instead? Does the required sting of death remain? Is that enough? What about the user’s items and body?
This brings me to Gemstone IV (if you have never played this game, I highly recommend you stop what you are doing, and go play. If you can’t get a character to level 25 in that game, you can’t call yourself a gamer, and I have no respect for you as a designer…yeah, big words I know, but the depth of design in that game is TIGHT). In GSIV when you die, your body falls to the ground, and your soul is kicked right on out. You can’t do a thing but float there, tied to your body by a thin link. Your only hope is to wait for a Cleric AND an Empath to show up and help you out. The Empath heals your body of injuries, and the Cleric calls upon the gods to restore you to life. Now, this is where things get interesting.
If a Cleric heals you while your body is still mucked up, you get rezzed with a bleeding body and promptly die AGAIN. Not a good thing obviously. To make things even more fun, a lot of the mobs in GSIV (especially those damned Ice Trolls) will drag your body around from room to room, or do other irritating things to you, just to piss you off. In the old days, you dropped everything in your hands when you died (including your Battleaxe +20!) which was quickly picked up by the nearest mob and used with vigor against the rescue party. Ah, such fun! Anyway…what happens if a Cleric doesn’t show up? Oh, the horrors! After five minutes, the link to your body goes bye bye, and you show up at the nearest temple. Your old body goes poof as well. Of course, because the GSIV designers are so bad ass, they have thought of everything. Any player can carry a flask with some lifekeep potion…they simply pour it in yer mouth and your soul will stick around for a while longer while your friends find a local Empath and Cleric to show up.
Yes, you lose experience and whatnot in Gemstone, but my point here was more on the actual mechanics and not so much on the penalty. So far, this is the best, and most fun death to be had in any MMORPG. Surely there are some variations or interesting new ideas to be played with (I have a few, but they are super secret…if ya want to know, feel free to deposit a few mil in my bank account so I can make the game hehe).
Back to penalties! I favor some form of temporary loss of power and ability. You should keep all of your experience, but maybe earning NEW experience is dramatically reduced for some period of time, or maybe all of your spells function at half strength (or, on the other hand, they require twice as much mana as before for the duration of the penalty). The same should go for physical skills…the warrior should be weakened and unable to endure the rigors of extended combat.
Ideas ideas ideas…what if the more you died, the more the risk of something really BAD happening to you? How about, if you die more than 20 times after reaching some level or another, your chance of being dragged to hades increases? One day you get the lucky roll and you find that the underworld isn’t very happy about having you snatched from their clutches day after day, and they are determined to keep you around this time. Oh, crap, you think! I gotta get out of here.
Boom! Side quest! More content! Rescue mission! Ah, the possibilities are endless. Sure, it may only happen to you once in a real world year of playing, or maybe the underworld REALLY wants you and it happens several times. In any case, it would shake up the usual Friday night grind a bit, wouldn’t it?
Is it possible to turn the dreaded death event into something a little more interesting that has some actual gameplay value to it, besides the usual “oh crap, I died and its gonna take me days to catch up” baloney?
What do you think? Did this really long blog post bore you to death? You know you have an opinion! Let’s hear it. Hurry up though, dem bones ain’t gonna dance all night long.
~ Nicodemus (maybe I should change my name to “The Long Blogger” haha)
Your post reminded of another post I made a while ago:
http://darthpixel.com/story/000000035
Now, I will admit my views are drastic and impractical.
I wish such dreams could be pursued without risk.
Just a quicky comment on this before I head off to bed.
I wouldn’t mind a temporary penalty that lasted ofr a bit if I were say, out killing outdoor mobs. However as it stands in most MMO’s I think it blows in instances/dungeons for one simple reason. Respawns..if i have ot sit there and wait 15 minutes or whatever to recover from being dead, then the mobs had best quit popping out of thin air to replace themselves. I shouldn’t have to kill the same mobs in the same places every single time I die. If I just spent an hour or more going through with my group slaying the evil denzens of Yadda, no way should they be back in the near future.
As for the GSIV sequence you emntioned, it sounds really cool mechanics/storywise…nut most peopel don’t want to be sitting there for however long hoping someone wanders by (oh and you didn’t mention what happens after you pop out at the temple…is your gear gone or are you doing a corpse run? ) just so you can continue to play the game you are paying money for. I was actually liking this idea until you mentioned you need two classes (the dying again if your body isn’t healed part is brilliantly funny, and logical :D )
I think another reason MMO’s have gone to the Exp penalty is due to PvP in part. If you are killed, and when you rez you are now much weaker, it is going to inevitably lead to griefing where someone just camps your corpse after you die, and just keep skilling you over and over. They could avoid this ifthey mad eit so you were automatically flagged non PvP for the length of time you are weak (you oculd of course choose to turn ithe flag off if you so wish) *
“Ideas ideas ideas…what if the more you died, the more the risk of something really BAD happening to you? How about, if you die more than 20 times after reaching some level or another, your chance of being dragged to hades increases? One day you get the lucky roll and you find that the underworld isn’t very happy about having you snatched from their clutches day after day, and they are determined to keep you around this time. Oh, crap, you think! I gotta get out of here”
I like the sound of that. It’d be nice if the spirit world in MMO’s actually had a purpose other than to make you sort of misty :P Give some certain abilities when one is dead and once you reach the limit you spoke of a quest while still IN the spirit world (one of the cooler things in WoW was having ot be dead to get the quest for the key to BRD) to sort of clean your slate or lessen your penalties or whatever.
Ok that’s it for now, went a lil longer than expected and I didn’t really offer my own ideas as to put it bluntly I have no clue wth i’d prefer or if what I do prefer would be a good idea..lol Quite happy to sit here and comment on others ideas though :P
,
* bit of a side note here I believe the two forms of combat, PvE and PvP makes it extremely hard ot make a balnaced MMO. Stuff that’s fine in PVE is too powerful in PvP so you nerf it..which leads to it being too weak in PvE so you buff it and vice versa..etc etc It goes deeper than that but that’s the easiest example I can think of
My WSG queue is about to come up, so I’ll be brief…
In my perfect MMORPG, death pentalties are light because the penalty is not in failure, but in lack of success. You don’t level from butchering 1,000 rats, none of which are at all challenging to you, but rather from completeing genuinely challenging objectives. The penalty for death is that you don’t complete the objective. You have to try again, to practice, until you get it right. If you fail in, say, Tony Hawk 2 (one of my personal Favorite Games Ever), you don’t lose money or experience or whatever. You just have to try again.
If you believe Raph Koster (as I recall it being), ‘fun’ in games is about learning in a relaxed and interesting environment. MMOGs should lean more on learning and less on stick-of-punishment approaches to their gameplay.
Rand…
Apologies, I should have finished commenting on the GS death…let’s say you don’t have an Empath handy…there is a skill called “first aid” that -temporarily- stops the bleeding from bleeding wounds. Real risky though. So, anyone with high enough skill (depends on how bad the damage is) could “tend” your wounds, so you could get raised…at which point you stuff your face with the appropriate herbs to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds. However, since you weren’t healed by an Empath…you now have SCARS in the appropriate body areas, which weakens your character somewhat. Nothing like losing an eye or nasty scars on your hands to ruin your day.
Players can also simply drag your body to a safe area where Clerics and Empaths hang out (you get experience from healing and rezzing), and of course there are some higher level spells that allow some classes to teleport TO someone, and others (different class availability haha) to ‘port groups back to town. All in all, death in GSIV isn’t all that bad, and is sometimes fun. There are a lot of fun emotes to do to a dead body, and there are a few you can do as a ghostie floating around.
By the way, I like the idea of spirit world as well. I’ve been working on some design mechanics around that for a few years now.
NBarnes…while I agree with Raph for the most part, there is also a lot of fun to be had in high stress environments. Conflict for example, is certainly NOT relaxed and is the heart of competition. We all know how much fun competition is. As far as punishment goes…would you rather play laser tag or paintball? Which is more realistic? Which has a stronger penalty for getting hit? Is one or the other more suited to casual play?
Anyway, you say the penalty for death is not completing the objective…you mean having to start all over again? In a linear console game (eww! console games!) this certainly makes sense. Die/fail and start the level over. No problemo.
What about in a persistent environment though? Should death be semi-permanent? You die, and you are suddenly level 1 all over again? But perhaps you get to keep your skills and your loot, but maybe the penalty you suffer is in your overall power? For example, I mentioned before that I thought that the whole fireball 1, fireball 2, fireball 3 style of magic design was crap. I would much rather there only be one fireball spell, that gains in power as the character gains in experience. I wonder how that would be accepted by the masses…death knocks you back down to power level 1. You still have all your gear, loot, skills, and whatnot, but your fireball sucks ass. At least until you can gain some power again (experience?). I dunno, late night rambling now….
The idea of losing exp when you die always struck a sore spot with me. I think death is a learning experience for your character, so why would you lose exp?
My most enjoyable deaths have been in games that have some sort of “after-life” quest to restore you back to the living world.
Games with really strong death penalties only make me quit the game sooner, as I get tired of “wasting” my gaming time which I measure on a fun scale.
Games with too light of a death penalty remove some of the skill needed to accomplish a goal. Instead you just keep zerging back until the goal is accomplished. Also not fun.
* PvP – Death will be frequent, and players will want to get back into the action asap.
* Time – MMOs seem to be about time-sinks, and most death systems come down to punishing the player by making them spend time redoing stuff (regaining xp/levels)
* Debt – is much friendlier than loss, but still comes down to time, as above.
* Friends – for me, having fun adventuring with close friends can lessen the pain of death/failure, even increase the comradery due to the common experience of death (TPK Total Party Kill)
A Hardcore NWN Persistant World I spent a couple of years in had the Fugue Plane – you die and thats where you go, to sit until someone rezzed your body at the temple in town (for a large gold cost). You lost xp/gp when you died, then lost more if you didnt get a full rez. What made this enjoyable was the large amount of time I had, and the people I regularly played with. The world was extremely challenging but the tangible rewards and leetness/e-peen were worth it.
Now what I am looking for is a world I can log into and play with friend whenever I want, not to have to deal with levels and penalties.
* The death system should make sense ‘Lore-Wise’.
* ‘The penalty for failure is having to try again’ – agreed.
I thought about this on my way to work this morning and found something more to add.
I used to play a MMRPBG (Massively Multiplayer Real-life Paint Ball Game) with 300 people playing at the same time. When you died in the game, you went to the hospital where you waited 5-10 minutes to heal up and then you went back out to the battle. It sucked to get killed because you had to sit out, so you tried not to get killed. Once you *were* sitting out you took a break, drank some water – went to the bathroom, whatever. And that was actually nice.
I think I might actually enjoy a death penalty which just made you sit out for 5 minutes or so. Give me a chance to take a little break while the healers fixed me up. Would get old if I was getting killed a lot though, so the frequency of death needs to be considered in the penalty.
From the “console gamish” perspective, you could just reset people to the last ‘checkpoint’ area, with any progress since then undone. That actually might make more sense in some MMOs than the current system from a lore/immersion viewpoint, and be nicer on raiders/instancers, but obviously has problems on an overworld.
I mean, even if you set each checkpoint to the end of a fight, you’re still going to have creatures randomly going to full health, or player characters popping in mid-air (possibly above enemies).
So, what should we aim for in a death penalty?
Well, we’ve got to decide what the problems can be, first. If we make a penalty too soft, players will exploit death (ie zerging), won’t really feel challenged, and will be less tied to the lore and to their team members. After all, if a battle gets easier (and not due to extra knowledge on the player’s parts) every time you die, you’d be willing to die a lot against bosses or big monsters. If your team mate’s screwups don’t matter to you, you won’t worry about making a great team, or teaching bad players.
If you make the penalty against the game too harsh, you’ll discourage players from exploring, trying new things, and at the far end, even discourage them to the point where they’ll go afk or stop playing. That’s not good, either.
So, to avoid the former situations, we’ve got to make a solution that makes a fight the same difficulty, no harder or easier, than before you died. It’s got to make players know their teammates or at least trust them and their decisions. The penalty should avoid punishing explorers are harshly as it punishes players who ‘fail’ at a fight. And it shouldn’t be ended with a time-based penalty, or a penalty that makes players feel like a big ‘ding’ has gone undone.
If we want to make it the consolish ‘checkpoint’ system, for example, make is so players choose where to place their checkpoints (out of battle only, of course), and that each checkpoint makes experience/rare drop gain lower, probably using a similar system to FFXI.
The PnP rpg with a death penalty you were probably thinking of is AD&D. (Though others may have used similar mechanisms.) Every time a Raise Dead / Resurrection spell was used on a dead character, the Constitution score was reduced permanently by one point. The rules even specifically pointed out that the originally Con score was the limit…. while you might get your attribute raised, you couldn’t be raised/res’d more times than that. Though IIRC, wish’s didn’t have that limitation – extremely high level magic, but certainly finding a ring wasn’t out of the question. (And incentive to save those wishes, too.)
Of course, there was also a human DM who could fudge the die rolls to keep people from dying out of extremely bad luck.
Rather than making death the strategic point to work around, I’d like to see death made into an actual gameplay element. I’m thinking of a karma and reincarnation system. Perhaps something similar to what’s seen in Fable (never played the game, only an observation). The game would have an outter karma system where evil actions make you more evil and good actions make you more good, however, if you died while doing one of the actions, your stats, abilities, and what not may change depending on how you died. This would also be a way to demark good or evil characters and would affect how people interacted with that player. Perhaps visual things, such as horns (stealing from Fable again), would appear on the more evil characters. All other players would know this player would be evil and would trust them less. The one thing I would like to avoid with this system is players choosing whether or not they are good or evil merely by abilities. I want the gameplay differences between each to be different and not merely cosmetic. In other words, I want the way the player WANTS to play to be the main factor. I can think of some ways to do this but nothing brilliant has popped into my mind yet.
Of course, this would lead to exploiting of players causing their characters to die in certain ways to become the way they want to play. There would also need to be a viable reason to be good or evil or neutral because, as I see it, a lot of players tend to be a balance of good and evil in games. If there’s a viable reason to be good, then the player may play a role of being good. I often don’t see player playing their real role in MMOs and this would facilitate it to an extent.
To deal with exploiting is another tricky situation. The karma and reincarnation system would have to be created fool-proofed and deep. For example, dying from a PvE encounter would not really affect how you reincarnate because dying in an PvE encounter is highly controllable. However, dying in a PvP encounter is not unless you plan it with another character before hand. There are ways I can see of controlling even PvP exploitation, however, but they’re much more trickier and I just thought up this idea and haven’t had time to play around with it.
I’ve also thought of permanent death systems and how they can be practical even to the least hardcore. This goes back to character creation and the lack thereof I see in MMOs. I’d like people to care about their character and what better than a permanent death? Of course, as I see it, an MMO that would create character relationships and would make permanent death not seem harsh but practical, perhaps even enjoyable, would have to be widely different from the mainstream MMOs that are out there. I haven’t come up with some good ideas on this one yet.
“I should note that the casual and hardcore gamers of the people I talked to were unexpectedly mixed for both opinions.”
Strange, but not unexpected I guess. After your last post, I did a highly unscientific survey amongst my very casual friends and they were all dead set (ha!) against almost all death penalties. I didn’t think CoH’s was too bad, although the hospital bit was a bit wierd. There you simply slow down exping until you work off debt (you could say you’re not as efficent since your body is still recovering, I guess), but I’d add an option to truck out to your corpse to half it.
A massive time-sinky death mechanism, but one I think might be different, is the establishment of a spirit world you have to fight to get to your corpse. This was what we had planned to use in a failed mmorpg game I had been involved in trying to get going. What this means is EVERY CR would be long, so you’d have to have another option for the quickie player, say a GY rez with a penalty. For the spirit world option, you’d be a spirit (think WoW for ease of mental visualization) and as you neared your corpse, spirit versions of the mobs of the area would be there. They would have to be single pullable, non-social, and weaker than normal ones of the area (so that everyone could succeed – this is a 100% win situation). You’d have to kill a certain amount of them to be able to return to your corpse. Fighting the spirits of the underworld, if you will, for the right to return to the world of the living. Yes, it’s a HUGE time sink, but it was original.
I have always been a fan of the way we handle death in the D&D game i currently play in. At low levels death is pretty much permanent, until you, and your party, can afford to pay a powerful cleric to raise you. Once you reach a certain level you can get rezzed by the party cleric or can almost certainly afford and find an NPC cleric who can help.
If you don’t get raised you need to create a new character, one level lower and with only gear appropriate to that level, if you do get raised you just lose the level. You lose exp because the mind is a fragile thing and shorter term memories will be lost in the trauma (or something similarly logical).
This could work in MMOs, once you can afford to you can pay an insurance that if you die a cleric will raise you. This is of course assuming your corpse gets taken to a suitable location, or the authorities are informed, which means another market for message spells that go off on death and teleport contingencies to return you to the appropriate place.
If you can’t afford to be rezzed then your character is gone, you get to create a new character one (or several if there are lots of levels) level lower and chosing appropriate gear from a list based on your old kit (the better your old kit the better the new choices).
For this to work however gameplay needs to be modified and challenges developed that don’t just rely on lots of excessivly tough fights.
“For this to work however gameplay needs to be modified and challenges developed that don’t just rely on lots of excessivly tough fights.”
And I think that is another reason why death penalties aren’t more involved/harsher. I would hate to imagine that kind of penalty for me when my guild was working our way to Ragnaros, let alone actually fighting him, the ENTIRE raid dies multiple times just killing him (we just downed him for the first time about 2 weeks ago on our 5th total time trying, and have yet to kill him a second time). Using a sytem such as you describe would lead one to be steadily lower and lower in level with the current game mechanics in place (hell i’d have been knocked back to level 55 last Raggy fight…and lost gear that took a long time to get). A better example owud be those poor fools who have been fighting Cthun for the last few weeks or so..died every time, because the mob was wayyyyyyyyy too hard. But with the relatively light death penalty in WoW, they kept trying and they tried different things.
So as cool AND realistic/logical as it sounds, as you said gameplay would have ot be modified..HEAVILY. For one…developers would have to stop making these uber mobs that are only going to die if you stand in the exact right spot and cast the right order of spells and yell Ooga Booga 37 times. One should have atleast a 30-40percent chance when going up against a mob for the first time with a harsh death penalty. Otherwise you are oging to end up with people to scared to try anything because of the fear of death. There should always be more than one way to down a mob (and by multiple ways to down one, one hsould not be more effective than the other).
You come down to having ot balance between the mobs difficulty level (you don’t want your Uber Lord of Doom to die to the first group to get to him) and your death penalty. The penalty has to be harsh enough to make a player take notice…yet not too harsh that it smothers the gameplay of a large portion of the game, and not so light that people just zerg like hell. WoW’s death penalty seems light in the lower levels, but as you go up to the raids it gets to be a bit more than just an equipment penalty due to the sheer number of people involved. If a raid wipes it tends ot be around 10 minutes or so before the group can do anything again. So while it’s not incorporated in to the game itself there is a bit of a wait period due to death in WoW (barring you rezzing yourself at the GY)
———————
“A massive time-sinky death mechanism, but one I think might be different, is the establishment of a spirit world you have to fight to get to your corpse. This was what we had planned to use in a failed mmorpg game I had been involved in trying to get going. What this means is EVERY CR would be long, so you’d have to have another option for the quickie player, say a GY rez with a penalty. For the spirit world option, you’d be a spirit (think WoW for ease of mental visualization) and as you neared your corpse, spirit versions of the mobs of the area would be there. They would have to be single pullable, non-social, and weaker than normal ones of the area (so that everyone could succeed – this is a 100% win situation). You’d have to kill a certain amount of them to be able to return to your corpse”
As I said in my first response I like the idea of a spirit world, but for the love of god please don’t turn any sort of spirit world quest into yet ANOTHER farming quest. There are plenty of those in the regular game (no matter what game it is). Maybe make the penalty harsher and harsher as one goes along and give it a time period Example: You have died 20 times in the past week (just throwng numbers out there) so now your death penalty is harsher you go on to die another 15 times within a week so it becomes harsher still (explain it as the Spiritworld trying harder ot hold on to you so it takes you longer to recover your full power back). You decide that your next death you are going to do the quest to reset your penalties. It should always remain optional though, the death penalty should not get so harsh that it becomes a true hindrance to the game (remeber that foremost, it’s a game, people want ot have fun) but is more of a really pressing inconvenience, that you can either choose to get rid of or live with it.
Hrm, side quests, like finding your way out of hades, should not be an opportunity to hunt for loot or special mobs for farming. Further, it shouldn’t happen so often as to be a pain in the ass you have to deal with everytime you die.
Also…I think there should be a distinction between being knocked unconscious and dying. I.e. you can be completely knocked out, and you are just stuck there until someone comes along and revives you (herbs, medicines, potions, spells, whatever). Mobs should -generally- not mess with you when you are out, unless you really pissed them off, in which case they might drag you away somewhere, or keep pounding on your skull. You should regain health slowly (REAL slow) until you are back at 1hp, at which point you revive on your own, but are in a severely weakened state…which lasts until you can heal up.
But if something REALLY traumatic happens (or maybe your negative health is greater than your positive health…-120 versus +110 for example) then you “die” and are in need of a rezz. Your health should not restore itself like it would if you were knocked unconscious. A cleric or something similar is needed for the rezz. You do not lose any experience, although learning new experience is slowed for some short period of time as you deal with the effects of going through such a physical and spiritual ordeal.
Now, if you don’t get a rezz in some period of time, your body decays at some point…you lose your inventory (anyone can loot the “remains” which includes any items you were carrying (since this is a game, I think it should be fine for people to keep equipped items/gear). Anyway, your body respawns back at some temple or another (you have been favored by the gods, unless of course the minions of Hades get a grip on you first). You maybe lose a con point or something (ala AD&D) else equally distasteful. But never should you lose any experience or skills.
I guess that sums up how I would like to see things…or at least a start to an alternative to the normal thing.
By the way, I think I am going to address uber mobs in my next blog entry.
Nicodemus
Nic – Note that I did flag mine as ‘my perfect game’. I wasn’t speaking at all to some theoretically perfect game for everybody. I’m a strong believer that there is no one perfect game, and that goes for MMOGs, too. I think that my game, built around in-game challenges to progress and a very light death penalty can live happily alongside, say, EVE. EVE, with its strong in-game, player-driven economy, relies heavily and appropriately upon the permanent loss of ship and fittings to drive the demand side of its economy, and I have no problems at all with that (hey, I’m still playing it (Ferox == the rox!)).
Just a quick comment, as it’s late here
“you don’t want your Uber Lord of Doom to die to the first group to get to him”
Why not, if the party that comes along is good (not perfect, just good) and can react and adapt fast they should have a decent chance of taking him down. And next time he spawns he should be different (random damage type, resistances, spells known etc) so that spoilers can’t overly spoil it.
I am not a believer in making things next to imposible in order to be challenging, more imagination, slower combat (to allow time to notice a weakness and adapt within the one fight) and puzzles can add difficulty, not just greater mob health and more damage output.
I’ll expound on this tommorow
Just a quickie, hope it hasn’t been mentioned yet: The most annoying thing that can happen is when you die because you had lag and fell of a cliff/you computer crashed and you got slaughtered by some unspoken horror/anything else happened you don’t have any real influence about. Granted, this kind of stuff always happens in computer games and there is no real way around it, but those kind of incidents even used to piss me off in WoW, with that pretty insignificant penalty for dying. Hell, even when you play Counter-Strike or some other FPS, most people are really pissed when you got fragged partly due to a bad internet connection and/or framerate. When I played EVE for a bit, I lost my first destroyer that way (in it’s first battle, I should mention, and it was uninsured… but the ship sucked anyway) – and believe me, my keyboard did not excactly survive this, either. Hefty death penaltys have their places, but when this penalty can occur to you due to technical failure, it becomes extremly annoying.
meh, death nowadays is so carebaer and pointless I’m wondering why many games even bother implementing it at all.
Good article, but as always DragonReamls > Gemstone
I think many great points have been brought forth here, and I’m not about to rehash them. I just wanted to state for the record, if anyone’s counting, that I agree with harsh death penalties if they are done correctly.
As I stated in the previous post (“the perect mmo”), not every knockdown has to result in horribly messy, bloody ludicrous gibs, permadeath. I agree with Nic that merely being “knocked down” or put unconcious should be the sort of standard, default, “awww shucks, time to grab a beer” result of losing a fight. Over time, your character (unless poisoned) would slowly regain conciousness and have the ability to run the hell outta there. No experience loss, no item loss, no “rez sickness”, none of that crap. (I love the idea of GAINING experience when you die ….. boy THAT was a stupid move, I’ve LEARNED never to do THAT again, etc)
This would open up the mechanics of the online world – it would allow for more experience to be gained in the not-so-usual arts of herbalism, alchemy and the like, and would give the player a true feeling of immersion – Can you imagine the feeling of dread that would come over you after having Klog the allmighty Underpants gnome knock you on your ass? “Oh no! Did I piss him off just a little TOO much? Is he going to run me through? Will that useless cleric finally pull his own weight and drop some of those funny dried up leaves on me?” or “Are we all finally going to die and get thrown into the woodchipper?”
While a _true_ permadeath might be a little on the harsh side (or is it?), dying should become highly discouraged and should be an incredibly nasty ordeal. ….but who says you have to DIE every time you go up against that damn uber-squad of teenage mutant ninja monkeys? What if they just left your nasty broken body alone after you’ve fainted or passed out. Unless you, personally, did something to cheese them off, I would think that, realistically, they would other things to worry about at that particular moment in time.
Im not very fond of getting reamed by dragons tsweat. I’ll take finding some gemstones any day.
a55cl0wn…the image of Klog the allmighty Underpants gnome really messed up my day. Thanks. Thats almost as bad as midget clowns showing up at my door selling vacuum cleaners (don’t laugh, it could happen!).
Eh….I wonder what would happen if MMOs adopted the old arcade model.
You die, you need to put in a quarter for a rezz. Otherwise, game over. Permadeath!
I should be working, but…
I’ve been thinking about death penalties as part of game mechanics lately as well. I’ve come to some interesting conclusions, especially since some are contradictory to what I’ve believed before.
1) Keep the levels, but make the game so they’re not barriers. Everyone gets to participate in the battle, regardless of level, but the higher level characters are more effective or efficient. Most importantly provide roles that everyone can fulfill.
2) Level up on a record of success, stay where you are with a record of failure. Levels are gained by the successful completion of quests, with faster levelling for better gameplay and teamwork.
3) Drop the experience points. You don’t need ’em, and they only encourage grinding. Everyone wants a scoreboard and that’s what the levels and your pretty equipment are for.
4) Dying may mean quest failure, assuming you’re playing solo or it’s not the goal of your quest or encounter.
5) Dying has two stings: opportunities lost, and an enforced time out. If you’re knocked out of the battle, you may lose some or all the rewards for the quest, or you’ll get less money so you can buy less stuff later. Untreated, dead characters are out of the action for 60 seconds, after which time they’ll be put someplace safe to pay for healing or suffer downtime (it’s the player’s choice: cash or time, so pick one). Of course, if grouped or near other friendly players, the dead character may be revived, healed in a hurry and made ready to get back into the thick of it.
I’m not in favor of knocking characters down. As Psychochild wrote, “One major problem with your design: there’s a negative feedback loop with failure. If failure lowers a player’s available options and resources, this encourages future failure from the player.” I’m very averse to negative feedback loops after having this identified, and should have recognized it from my own experiences in EQ (having lost everything on a lowbie in Lavastorm once, and also after gaining and losing a certain level several times where four hours of grinding could be erased in two deaths).
Consider where you want development resources spent, on the main game or on the mini game for dead characters. If the average player spends less than five minutes in the mini game per week, you probably would have had a better return on investment by implementing a resurrection timer.
“Just a quick comment, as it’s late here
“you don’t want your Uber Lord of Doom to die to the first group to get to himâ€
Why not, if the party that comes along is good (not perfect, just good) and can react and adapt fast they should have a decent chance of taking him down. And next time he spawns he should be different (random damage type, resistances, spells known etc) so that spoilers can’t overly spoil it.
I am not a believer in making things next to imposible in order to be challenging, more imagination, slower combat (to allow time to notice a weakness and adapt within the one fight) and puzzles can add difficulty, not just greater mob health and more damage output.
I’ll expound on this tommorow ”
Well I didn’t neccesarily mean it should be impossible. I wen on to further explain that uber mobs with no chance to kill unless you know the exact pattern or strategy = death for raid is not good, and that a party gettign to a boss mob for the first time should atleast have a chance at killing him (atleast 20-30 percent on the first try)
—————–
@Nic
“Eh….I wonder what would happen if MMOs adopted the old arcade model.
You die, you need to put in a quarter for a rezz. Otherwise, game over. Permadeath! ”
Two things would have to happen.
1 i’m not going to pay another fee every time I die on top of a 15-20 dollar monthly fee.
2. The issue of those uber mobs comes up again. Heh on a bad night that could start getting (relatively) expensive.
As someone else mentioned, the death penalty should fit the game.
In an MMOFPS a la Counterstrike, there is no particular need to make the death penalty fit with the mythos, nor is there much of a need for a penalty outside of a 10-second respawning period.
In an online racer, your current race is forfeit and you have to spend some hard-earned prize money to get your car fixed up again. If the racer is really realistic, maybe you go to the hospital and miss many race opportunities, or maybe you die.
In an online puzzler or world building sim, such as Puzzle Pirates, A Tale in the Desert and Second Life, death doesn’t need to exist for the game to be fun or challenging. The point of these games is to have casual fun in your community, while perhaps engaging in some online barn raising.
In an online MMOGF(C) (Massive Multiplayer Online Grind Fest, Casual) like a massive Diablo clone, it would be nice if death fit the mythos but it’s not required. Death should sting somewhat, but the penalties should be largely superficial – equipment deterioration, minor corpse looting (maybe the gold carried on your person), perhaps some XP debt, however stupid the concept is.
In an online MMOGF(HC) (figure that one out yourself) like Lineage II or RF Online, death is similarly not required to fit the mythos, but penalties should be high so as to encourage skillful play. While it is not “fun” to be set back several days because you got yourself killed, it does force you to either rethink your strategy or avoid that situation in the future.
In an online MMORPG – the like of which exist only in the the sparse and vague insights of legendary game developers yet to come – death is either permanent, or its lack of permanence fits perfectly into the game world’s mythos. Penalties may be high or low, depending on the nature of the resurrection mechanics, but will likely be high enough so as to keep the game universe in a well-balanced state. For example, each resurrection may demand the life of another living being of equal stature, or being resurrected may require a vow of loyalty to a particular deity, or a debt in karma that is taken into account in every situation affected by chance.
I must stress again, like the word “cyberspace” is to the Internet, no amount of referring to something as an “MMORPG” will make it one. WoW, CoH/V, EQ/II, AA, DDO etc all fit in somewhere between MMOGF(C) and (HC).
“I must stress again, like the word “cyberspace†is to the Internet, no amount of referring to something as an “MMORPG†will make it one. WoW, CoH/V, EQ/II, AA, DDO etc all fit in somewhere between MMOGF(C) and (HC).”
I could not agree more. The last MMORPG I saw that had any real RPG elements that involved players and encouraged it, was in a text based game. I think, for the most part, all of the titles you mentioned (and plenty more) simply boil down to PvP/FPS style gaming set in a fantasy environment. Period.
I’m actually a little intrigued by the idea of a micropayment for rez.
1) It would make powerful characters with a lot of invested time leery to charge headfirst into battle, and instead encourage a more cautious, strategic approach
2) It would encourage players to discard their older characters for new, low-level ones to prevent losing cash, thereby reducing mudflation and the Hero Overpopulation Syndrome (HOS)
3) It would still allow those who are serious enough about the game to keep their character around even when faced with mortal danger – for a fee, which could be used to offset the monthly fee to play the game, which would encourage more players, which would further reduce HOS
Of course, the company would be slapped with a class action lawsuit the first time a major lag storm hits and everyone gets beaten up by kobolds.
Oh, and I can’t wait to hear:
“YOU OWE ME TWENTY BUCKS, YOU PIECE-OF-SH!!!T JOKE OF A CLERIC!!”
over Teamspeak. =)
Asheron’s Call had what I consider to be one of the best graphical MMO death events, both in terms of leniency and mechanical limitations. When you died, your Vitae, a percentage modifier for all your stats and skills, dropped to 75. This prevents zerging quite nicely. To make it a bit tougher, you also leave a corpse behind, dropping your most valuable unwielded loot, a large portion of your coin, and have a chance of dropping wielded gear which increases with level. So not only did you have to perform or organize a corpse run, but you’re far less capable of making it yourself. After that, Vitae was worked back up by gaining experience (So the player has to strengthen their frame back to full health).
“You should keep all of your experience, but maybe earning NEW experience is dramatically reduced for some period of time”
Thought just came to me. That *is* the “softer exp debt approach as in City of Heroes”.
One of the things I like about that system in modern MMOs is that it allows for exploration and creativity. A problem I’ve often perceived of late is that developers seem to have a tendency to use the threat of expensive/frustrating death penalties to prohibit players from pushing the envelope. They want encounters defeated within their idea of the function of character classes involved. They don’t want characters going where they wouldn’t be able to handle themselves. If players have to make a corpse run, they won’t be dragging their equipment into dangerous turf. If dying will make a character too weak to try again, they won’t experiment. Too often I’ve seen death wielded as a weapon in defence of restrictive game design.
What needs to be looked at is balance and alternative solutions, rather than “what is the best death mechanic”. The weight of the penalty of death should be inversely proportionate to the ease of death. Some games are, by design, hit or miss for every encounter you go into. In City of Villains I can solo large numbers of orange and red cons if they don’t have particularly damaging power sets (2-3 levels above), but a single elite boss at my level might kill five of my six minions in one AoE, leaving me running for the door, defenseless. Equally tricky are some travel powers. Rounding a corner at super-speed into the Ghost of Scrapyard and his legion of dozens of followers is an almost instantaneous death. Small amounts of exp debt (with a debt cap, too) are reasonable, there. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, makes it rather obvious what you can and cannot take by yourself. Elite mobs marked for group encounters can present an insurmountable challenge for some characters, while three mobs of even level are not blinked at. Death there (especially as a plate-wearer) can take a reasonable chunk out of your resources for repair, gives a crippling penalty for 10 minutes if you can’t or don’t want to return to your corpse, and can end an instance run if the beginning has respawned and players can’t make it back.
The alternative that needs to be looked at is incapacitation. Death should not be absolute. A ‘One moment you’re operating at full strength, next moment you’re flatlined’ system doesn’t help the suspension of disbelief much, and it necessitates leniency in death penalties. EQ2 tried to add incapacitation, but it’s a non-functioning system, because even after a character has lost the ability to act, the mob will take the time to administer a coup de grace instead of focusing on the rather violent teammates still opposing it. A system whereby a fallen player needed to be healed to be stabilized, and would regain consciousness after several minutes, would add an interesting dynamic. Let the healers watch out for the fallen to make sure they’re not dying. Let the tank pull the mob away from their bodies so they aren’t caught in AoE attacks. Put the unconscious at the bottom of the hate list and keep them there, so they’re not going to be targetted while a fight’s still going on, but if the group wipes they’ll be quickly put to death.
I was going to say just like Jezebeau that your less NEW xp thing is the same as CoH’s debt.
I think I’ve just realised that MMORPGs are not designed to be RPGs, they are just whack-a-mole with friends. While some things are cool in an RPG (single player or pen and paper) that is because you get it tailored to you; it can be used to expand the story. In MMORPGs it sucks. It already takes long enough to wipe on a boss, run/rez 40 people back to the encounter, rebuff, reorganise and try again. That is enough of a penalty to me that I don’t want to die. Make your death penalty any harsher than that and you better make the encounters easier or I’m just going to log off in disgust.
“less NEW xp thing is the same as CoH’s debt.”
No, not at all. I don’t like -debt- or loss. I’m fine with slowing xp gain for a while, but I dont like knocking someone into the negative.
“I think I’ve just realised that MMORPGs are not designed to be RPGs, they are just whack-a-mole with friends.”
That’s what I’ve been saying for a while now. MMORPG needs to be redefined and the bar needs to be raised.
“No, not at all. I don’t like -debt- or loss. I’m fine with slowing xp gain for a while, but I dont like knocking someone into the negative.”
But that’s not what their debt system does. Half your xp gains go towards your debt until it’s paid off. It’s like garnishing wages. No, it’s not simply reduced gains on a time limit, but that’s a necessity. It keeps people from just leaving their characters afk for a while and then having no problems. Gamers would just find something better to do for a while, and likely something they could sit down and play for the length of time they choose.
PS: In fact, it’s almost a better system because it supports their mentor system. Higher level players can lower themselves to match a lower-levelled groupmate. While they can’t gain exp in that state, they can pay off debt. This also offers some relief to the “Hero Overpopulation” problem. In older games it can be difficult to find enough characters at lower levels to form a proper group to complete an objective, because everyone’s playing their higher characters. With the mentoring incentive (especially through the 40-50 grind), up to half of a group can be taken from a large supply of players who’d normally be way too powerful for your mission.
My most notable permadeath experience happened in a pencil and paper game. My fifth level character “pemadied” and the GoreMaster insisted that i restart an entirely new persona, from level one. But all of my friends were still level five. I tried to tag along on a few of their further adventures but *surprise* i was very quickly killed again …. and again …. and again. The areas they visited were now too deadly for me. I left the group, and soon afterward the entire club broke up.